navarin

The word "navarin" appears in French culinary writing in the 1830s, the decade after the Battle of Navarino of October 1827, where British, French, and Russian fleets destroyed the Ottoman and Egyptian navy in the bay of Navarino in southern Greece. French patriotic feeling ran high after the victory, and several dishes were named in its honor during those years. The connection between the battle and the stew, however, has never been established with documentary evidence.

The competing etymology points to "navet," the French word for turnip. Turnips were a traditional component of the stew, and "-in" was a common diminutive or adjectival suffix in nineteenth-century French cooking terms. A navarin is a lamb or mutton stew with root vegetables; a "navarin printanier" adds the new turnips, carrots, and peas of spring.

By the time Auguste Escoffier codified the dish in his "Guide Culinaire" of 1903, navarin was a standard of French bourgeois cooking. He specified mutton, onions, tomatoes, potatoes, turnips, carrots, and peas, with a browned flour base for the sauce. The word "printanier" (spring-style) was added when the vegetables were young and the stew was made in April or May.

The dish entered English cookbooks in the late nineteenth century as "navarin of lamb," with the French word retained because English had no equivalent term for this specific preparation. It remains a canonical item on French bistro menus in spring. Whether the name honors a battle or a vegetable, the lamb has no opinion.